Flying slowly

[Werner Presber]

Flying slowly (Text via dreamers rise: http:// 
dreamersrise.blogspot.com/2011/03/flying-slowly.html)


By now, the status of the airship as an emblem of a kind of  
alternative, softer version of modern technological development is a  
well-established cliché, found throughout contemporary steampunk and  
fantasy from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials to the TV show  
Fringe. Why do these lumbering craft provoke such nostalgia?


Over the course of the 20th century, the Futurist aesthetic embodied  
by the airplane -- sleek, fast, loud, and efficient -- would  
gradually lose its appeal, done in by the nightmares of Guernica, the  
Blitz, Dresden, and the Enola Gay. The airship wasn't entirely  
innocent of such possibilities -- zeppelin raids killed hundreds in  
Britain in the First World War, and Thomas Harris's novel Black  
Sunday imagined a blimp as what we would now call a weapon of mass  
destruction -- but for lethal efficiency it really couldn't compare.  
Nor, in the end, could it compete commercially. For a brief period  
the airship seemed to offer a kind of compromise between the genteel  
leisure of the hot-air balloon and the machine-age imperatives of  
speed and maneuverability fulfilled by the airplane, but the disaster  
of the Hindenburg doomed it to be forever confined to limited and  
special uses like hovering over football stadiums. A sad but probably  
inevitable end for the emblem of a less hurried kind of technological  
development that perhaps wasn't really ever going to be possible.


Artists, fortunately, are less constrained by such considerations,  
and there's something particularly pleasing and restorative about the  
sight of an airship poised above a landscape -- or an iceberg.


The above four images are all from the Eisbergfreistadt project by  
the artists Kahn + Selesnick. The first two are in the form of  
postcards; the latter pair are notgeld (emergency money). There are  
more images on their website but you'll have to find and click  
through the links on the home page to see them.


The image above is by Donald Evans, an American artist who sadly died  
too young in a fire in the Netherlands in 1977. Evans's work  
consisted almost entirely of postage stamps, drawn actual size and  
appropriately perforated and often endorsed, of imaginary countries  
with names like Domino, Amis et Amants, Lichaam and Geests (Body and  
Soul), and Mangiare. (He also drew a fascinating set of zeppelin  
stamps for the country of Achterdijk, but unfortunately they are  
triangular in shape and too difficult for me to reproduce.) Willy  
Eisenhart's The World of Donald Evans, long out-of-print but not  
impossible to locate, is the indispensable collection.

dreamers rise: http://dreamersrise.blogspot.com/2011/03/flying- 
slowly.html

eisbergfreistadt- http://www.eisbergfreistadt.com/